Weymouth Sands

Over the whistling wavecrests and amid the flying surf, deep gurgling rock chasms, as the wind catches your soul. Over stalks of Sea lavender and over chittering seed-pods of sea thrift. You will bubble and delite with every line of this spectacular book. There are no writers of this calibre left on the planet in my opinion. I hope you all read this and become a Powys fan as I have. A readers special moment is here and waiting for you to envelope with and rejoice as a master wordsmith touchest you deeply. Not to mention the wicked humor that goes along with every page.Enjoy WT

This one seems to have been pulled from the most watery depths of Powys' imagination. It is saturated with an inscrutable feminine element, a mysterious plexus of forces. As much as I like most of his other books this one seems the most naturally magical, not as often forced as the others. The plot possibly suffers from his giving in to the dreamy depths of his imagination, but I welcome the richness of sheer strange atmosphere he manages because of this limitation.

Another extraordinary (and impossible to review, really) book from John Cowper Powys: The only things to which I can compare it are Proust, from whose depths Powys has clearly imbibed, and The Glastonbury Romance, except that this work seems much the much deeper and sadder of the two Powys works, touching on the subjects most dear to Powys, without any tangents regarding the Holy Grail legend etc. If one could put a name to the abiding undercurrent here, and one can't really, it would be Animism. Every dancing seaweed, incoming tide and rocky promontory seems suffused with a dynamic and personality of its own with a peculiar force over every character. This book is also the sadder of the two, but it is the sadness that arises from the unraveling of the deeps of human existence. Dostoyevsky is NOT the writer to which Powys should be compared---That writer is Proust. Powys is the only writer in English who comes even close to Proustian depths. Laurence Durrell made a stab at it in The Alexandria Quartet, but failed miserably----as far as his stated, hubristic intent to outdo both Proust AND Joyce in those four works. But Powys is not hubristic, thus his success. Becoming absorbed in this book, one eventually gets the feeling "...as if there were always blowing a faint, supernatural wind through this world, holding a secret of assuagement for troubled hearts, that is only perceptible when it can find a straw, a feather, a gossamer-seed, a leaf, in the debris of circumstance light enough for it to stir." P.541 It is a lovely, sad (at times also comic), deep book of wisdom. Scarce wonder that Powys never made it into a hidebound English Lit. Syllabus! So, read and take delight. You won't be graded!

Powys's scene is the overarching image for this silent, serene, sad book. The sands at Weymouth, and the sea lapping, or crashing, on them reflect the human drama, the human heart. The book is filled with unforgettable people, and Powys delves quietly beneath their conventional surfaces to reveal their torment, joy, longing.

Powys's most accessible and moving work. An excellent introduction to a truly great writer. Don't miss this one.